A solid state disk (SSD) is a high performance storage device that contains no moving parts. SSDs are much faster than typical hard disk drives (HDD) with conventional rotating magnetic media, and typically include a controller to manage data storage. The controller manages operations of the SSD, including data storage and access as well as communication between the SSD and a host device. Data de-duplication is the mechanism whereby duplicates of any given set of data are identified and cross-referenced, and only unique data patterns are written to the storage medium and all the duplicates are captured as pointers to the unique data sets, typically blocks. If there is duplication in the data stream, this technique allows the system to drastically reduce the amount of data written to the drive.